20 Lessons!

Dear Family,

Here are the answers to your questions.

Question #1: Why were you soaking wet when you wrote us last week?

Walking from District Meeting in Grays it was sending it down.

Question #2: Does Elder Mahendran do any German or Sri Lankan cooking for you?

No. Haha.

Question #3: Has the work improved now that the holiday is over?

Yes! As far as Total Lessons taught, last week was our best week since I've been in Southend. We taught 20 lessons and got 5 new investigators. Next week we need to put emphasis on setting dates for baptism with these people and getting them to Church. The new year has come in with a bang.

This past week was pretty good. A few highlights were: interviewing an 11 year-old for baptism, teaching a lot, and it's not been too cold.

One of the most amazing things that happened this week was that we were planning for the coming day and we really wanted to teach but we had lots of finding. Having faith, we wrote down in our planners that we would find someone and teach them a lesson at both 12:30 and 2:00. Finding people and sitting down with them is very difficult. Yet, at 12:45 and 2:15 we found people. We taught them lessons and we saw them both again 2 days later. The only limit to God's power is faith.

Setting goals with a fellow District Leader and Zone Leaders previously was a great experience. At the time we made them, I thought that they were going to be good. But when I took and applied those things, immediately we saw amazing things happening. Last week we applied the goal "welfare of the consecrated" where Elder Mahendran and I started the day with personal vocal prayers dedicating the day to Heavenly Father. Amazing things happen.

I have been loving my study of the scriptures, nothing gets lost when you have the fulness of the Gospel. I have been looking a bit into Isaiah and it is really good. I especially like Isaiah 29 which prophesiesof the Book of Mormon.

People have been more open during this early part of the year and are more willing to listen and act. I just pray that more people will continue to change for the New Year, the best goal they can make is to be baptized.

The amount of time to be a missionary seems too short, there is so much to learn and become yet so little time. I was asking my Zone Leader if it's possible to extend and he says he tried and got a no... maybe I'm special? Haha. I think I could be a missionary all my life, except for the fact that I want to raise 10 monster missionaries of my own. I can't wait to see the missionaries in 20 years that make us all look foolish.

I got a package from the Robertsons. Make sure you tell them thank you for me.

Mom, I have been thinking about scriptures and I really want to have a very well organized set of them. For some reason I am not able to order anything from lds.org. If you could send me a compact quad without any thumb things that would be fantastic. Also, if there is a name on it please put Elder Larsen so I can pass it on to Matt and people don't find out my secret identity, haha. I plan on using little sticker dots for every point in the Preach My Gospel lessons that will show on the sides of the pages, in so doing the thumb things get in the way and make it look ugly. I'm not positive if they have any with no thumb things at all but hopefully so.

Elder Larsen